On People Will Be Singing That Song From From The White Stripes "Elephant" Album Long After Elephants Themselves Are Extinct
It seemed like it was a soccer chant in Europe a few years before it crossed the pond.
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On How To Be A Monster: Life Lessons From Lord Byron
If you haven't, please read Tim Powers' Stress of Her Regard.
Byron, Polidori, the Shelleys are all major characters. It's quite wonderful.
I haven't picked up the follow up, which came out last year, Hide me Among the Graves, but Polidori's ghost plays a prominent role.
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On The RSS Reader Reader's Lament
*sigh* I have been using Flipboard on my phone and ipad to push my Google reader feeds through for about two years now. I really like it quite a bit, but they don't have a desktop interface.
I'm test driving Feedly, but I suspect that by July I'll have 15 different rss platforms obsessively updated with my google reader feed and I'll still feel incomplete. The thing I'll miss the most, of course, is the super full feeds extension on Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/super-full-feeds-for-goog/khbjahpecnkenngkidhioicnfpakihgo/details
If someone finds an RSS platform with this, lemme know.
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On Reckoning With 'Thelma & Louise'
I was 18 years old and saw it in the theater for the first time with my best friend. We just graduated from high school and were about to go on to college. I think afterwards, rather than Thelma or Louise, we wanted to be Callie Khouri when we grew up. Love this movie so much. Still want to be Callie Khouri.
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On "You drive like an old man."
@Astigmatism Heh. Oh yeah. The Prius CAN perform, but he doesn't want to let it because of the computer telling him how much energy he's using.
Of course, he LOVES to drive my mom's VW Sportswagen TDI. Performance and decent gas mileage, without the constant monitoring. (That's what I drive, and I concur. It's a pretty fun ride if you're trying to go a little responsible in vehicle purchases.)
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On "You drive like an old man."
My dad drove performance vehicles for years. Gas guzzling, torqued out, big engine cars that got from 0-60 on some nanosecond scale. (1969 912, 198something 928, 1990 Q45, 2000 911, 2002 X5).
Man got a Prius, and it's like I could walk faster. He's always playing the "can I not use gas?" game with his damned computer. Especially coming off lights. And the worst part? Damned Prius IS a pretty good performance vehicle.
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On Horsemeat Scandal "Breathtaking, Delicious" Say British Politicians
You know, I still can't give blood because I lived on that island in 1994 and 1995 and may or may not have ingested angry bovine.
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On Your Massively Open Offline College Is Broken
I went elite all the way. Top 5 liberal arts college with no more than 20 people in a class. Tutorials at Oxford (where I learned much more than I did than in the lecture hall). Socratic method in state law school. Graduate school with small class size and attentive advisor. I finished all of my graduate coursework 15 year ago, and this semester I have gone back to finish the two courses standing between me and (yet another) diploma.
My husband, on the other hand, joined the Marines after high school and joined the workforce after the Marines. A change in location timed with the economic downturn made staying in the workforce very challenging without a degree. So, this semester, well over 20 years after graduating from high school, he has decided to go back to college, and he's one of the 60,000 attending classes at Houston Community College. He intends to transfer over to the University of Houston after he gets some prerequisites out of the way. (He would have had to retake the SAT to directly go to UH.)
While our paths are different, I think our intent is the same: to get out with a degree that will help us going forward. I also think that we're both interested in actually learning what we are going to school to study. I was a great student, my husband is a reluctant one. I'm interested in pretty much everything, he's very focused. But we both want to absorb as much as we can out of our studies, and we take it very seriously.
Both of the classes I'm taking right now are taught across five campuses across the state over interactive TV. I'm at the main campus with the bulk of the student body, but there are about 160 people in each class. Both classes subdivide into sections, and I think the sections are much more manageable. Obviously, graduate students are much more motivated and self-directed than undergrads, but I haven't so far had any trouble with the massive classes (for what I'm used to) I'm in.
My husband is taking one online course and three live courses. All three of his in person teachers have flaked out on at least one course this semester. The class discussions can be interesting, but the classes are very basic. I think my husband appreciates not having to struggle in his first foray into education in 20 years, but I think he'd get pretty frustrated if he didn't move forward to more advanced discussions. The online course is offered free of charge; I think some distance education company is using it as a pilot for something or another. So far, I think my husband likes it, though he's had to change his learning style a bit. It's not a subject matter that he's particularly interested in, but it fulfills one of his requirements and transfers over to UH, so he's more than happy to be a guinea pig for credit.
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On Rick Perry Very Certain Nobody Can Do Business In California
I encourage him to bring over as many voting eligible people who want men to marry other men as possible.
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On Some Days Bears Are The Only Things That Make Sense
Thanks for this. We always need more bears.